Sunday, March 09, 2014

ukraine, russia and crimea

I’ve noticed with some amusement that the hawks have come
out about Russia and the Ukraine. Timothy Snyder at the NYRB is practically
foaming at the mouth, warning that if Crimea is annexed it will mean the end of
the “European order”. Similarly, David Remnick and his reporters at the New
Yorker are pulling out propaganda tricks that were old in 1991, when they were
used to propell the US into the defense of tiny, embattled, and surely
democratic (or semi-democratic or completely feudal) Kuwait.

Myself, I think Putin’s annexation ploy is probably a feint
that will allow him to get what he wants anyway by “compromising” and making
Crimea totally autonomous. But even if Crimea is annexed, there is little
Europe or the US can do about it.

However, there is a certain lesson, here – a lesson that we
are forced to swallow every four or five years. The lesson is that America’s
gung ho gang of interventionists always cause immense and long range trouble.
For instance, the Putin who Remnick spits on is, what? The product of Boris
Yeltsin. And as those who have memories longer than your average tv anchorman,
Boris Yeltsin’s second term was the result of a massive and unprecedented use
of private funds and government power, and was influenced by the same American
government/NGO nexis that has traditionally gone around making a sham of
elections in various “strategic” countries.

Remnick’s comments on the 1996 elections are, in this
context, extremely relevant. First he quotes from Adam Michnik: “Today, Russia
stands before a dramatic dilemma to which no one yet has given a reasonable
answer. What is better: to disrupt the rules of democracy and chase out the
totalitarian parties while they are sufficiently weak, or to respect the
democratic order and open these parties to the road to power?” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/17/1996_06_17_005_TNY_CARDS_000373659
This is the kind of orotund stuff that is the cat’s meow to American pundits.
Kissinger said it much better about overthrowing Allende: "I
don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The
issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for
themselves."

In the
event, though, Michnick’s dilemma was solved by a judicious use of power that
Remnick compared to what John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Rutherford Hayes
did – to which we can add George W. Bush, then not on the horizon. So the state
media saturates the zone with pro-Yeltsin news and fake photo ops.

It was a
classic operation, and it even involved a photo-op war – the war in Chechnya.
The war had a strange effect on Chechens – they seem to multiply right before
the election and vote in overwhelming numbers for your friend and mine, Boris
Yeltsin, putting him over the top. A winner!

In fact,
Time Magazine was so proud that they impertinently put out an issue, Yanks to
the Rescue, in 1996, detailing just how
the Americans had rejiggered the Yeltsin campaign. Of course, they avoided
talking about the really dirty stuff, but the model was created that would
elect Putin in 2000, and thereafter the Russians could take over the reins in
running dirty elections.

However,
butter does not melt in the mouth of yesteryear’s interveners, always straining
at the bit to visit some new disaster upon the world, and spitting on those who
oppose them as the friends of totalitarianism and the murderers of Mickey
Mouse.

I resent
that latter charge. My son loves his Mickey Mouse, and I wouldn’t hurt a hair
on that Mouse’s head.

But the
official mediasphere, for too too long, has had its run of DC’s toys. One of
the effects of the Bush-Obama deal, which solidified the plutocracy on the top
of the American economy and has allowed the bottom 80 percent to slip
decorously into the shit, is that it is hard to get that 80 percent all excited
about our national interests in Crimea.

Just as
with Georgia, Putin is playing for low stakes, and the US will lose and give
John McCain an ulcer. To say this isn’t to celebrate Putin, a true butcher and
an heir to an illegitimate and corrupt system.
It is to look at the real effect of the 90s fun filled shock therapy,
mafioso ologarcho takeover of industries, and the skewing of the very beginning
of Russian democracy by the farce put on in 1996. The let’s do it again crowd
should not be listened to.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.